HOWTO: Use IdentD with OSX Yosemite

If you’re an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) user like me, you’re probably familiar with or at least have heard of an identd service. IdentD is simply a service that, when accessed on port 113 of a computer, returns a simple string that identifies you as a user. If you were to watch the traffic you’d see something like this

1234,6578 : USERID : UNIX : itsmemario

Most OSX IRC clients don’t support this feature, and very few (if any) IRC servers require it any more. For those who needed this in the past, there was Identd for Mac. Which created a simple and functional icon in MacOS:

However in OSX Yosemite IdentD for Mac stopped working. The original author, Gallerand Sebastien, stepped up and made a new version. I’ve translated (as best as I could) his article and made a copy of his code here. So far it works great.